JD Power Owner Satisfaction 2009 - Introduction

IntroductionA new car may look great in the showroom, but will bits fall off after a few hundred miles? It’ll go well on a test drive, too, but will the gearbox fail after six months in stop-start traffic?

You can learn a lot when you take a car for a spin, but it’s hard to tell what it’ll be like to live with. So, step forward the What Car?/JD Power Vehicle Ownership Satisfaction Survey (VOSS) that asks many thousands of owners just that – you’ll get no closer to a crystal ball than this.

How it worksOwners are asked about every aspect of their car – from styling and boot space to comfort, performance costs and dealer service. This year, 15,764 owners told us all about how their cars had performed over nearly 284 million miles.

The cars – all registered between January 2006 and December 2007 – were rated by their owners in four areas in order to produce the overall VOSS result. Vehicle appeal is weighted as the most important of these areas, followed by vehicle quality and reliability, ownership costs and, finally, service satisfaction.